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The following is cast as a homily for January
12, 2003 , the Baptism of the Lord.
This homily, and similar efforts to follow,
is an exploration of how the rites we do, as
well as the scriptures we read, are integral
in preaching. This effort should be considered,
month by month, a work in progress that invites
your comments (gabeandtheresa@gmail.com).
In some congregations, these texts might make
useful discussions for those involved in preparing
the liturgy (the committee or board or whatever
entity or individual takes that responsibility).
Gabe Huck
We’ve heard the verses:
River Jordan is chilly and cold,
chills the body but not the soul.
River is deep and the river is wide;
milk and honey on the other side.
And we’ve heard some baritone voice singing: “
Deep river , my home is over Jordan .”
How could the only nearly river in this dry,
dry land not be part of the stories and the
songs? Of course the Jordan isn’t chilly
and cold; it isn’t deep and it isn’t
wide. The Jordan is a stream more than a river,
inching its way from the Sea of Galilee to the
Dead Sea , lowest place on earth’s surface.
But what’s the real truth? It’s
chilly! It’s deep! And it’s wide!
It has been said: “Water is the other
name for life.” That is so in North America
where drought was severe and widespread last
year; it is so in western Asia and southern
Africa where drought has hung on for several
years now. And water is the other name for life
among the people who have lived and now live
in the lands around the Jordan River .
John was baptizing in the Jordan . Who knows
now what this baptizing looked like? Some sort
of plunge, some sort of immersion, some sort
of dipping of the body. The gospel writers say
it was a reform movement John preached and baptism
was how one signified taking this reform to
heart. Stirred by John’s preaching, people
went into the water. Water is the other name
for life! And one day there was Jesus among
them and he, too, went into the Jordan . Along
with many others, he got baptized!
The baptizing John did was no harmless act of
piety. Herod, who had a good police force, was
alarmed enough by this baptizer to have him
put in prison. We know what happened next. So
water, for John, also had to do with death — as
indeed it does. Jesus, after his baptism by
John, began to preach repentance and there was
no turning back. Somewhere along the way to
Jerusalem and his own death, Jesus told his
friends: “There is a baptism with which
I must be baptized, and how great is my anguish
until it is accomplished!” (Luke 12:50).
This plunge into Jordan
’s waters became for Jesus an image of
another plunge, likely his execution.
How well the artists of later centuries understood
this when they made icons or frescoes of the
baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan! There
is Jesus, naked as the night he was born, naked
as he would be on the cross, standing waist-deep
in the Jordan . But the Jordan was not for these
artists that lazy, meandering stream. Instead,
the waters are leaping up around Jesus. Sometimes
it looks like the waters want to drown him and
sometimes it looks like they want to clothe
him! The fish are jumping in and out of their
water home to get a look. And well they might,
because what these artists were painting is
a fierce confrontation between good and evil.
Water might be the other name for life, but
all of us have witnessed when it is another
name for death. It is stronger than we are.
It is out of our control. It can have terrifying
breadth and depth. What better place for God’s
enemies to reside than the waters, the place
of chaos, of great monsters, of evil? So when
they painted Jesus’ baptism, the artists
imagined Jesus taking on the monsters of the
deep, trampling them down. They thought about
some lines in Psalm 74: “You stirred up
the sea in your might; / you smashed the heads
of the dragons on the waters” (74:13).
This is how it came to be that on the holiest
days of the year, when the church fasted, kept
vigil and told the story of the death of Jesus,
other stories were told. And we still tell some
of them on the night between Holy Saturday and
Easter Sunday. There was the opening of Genesis,
when
“earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness
covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept
over the waters” (1:1). The waters! And
there was the story of the great flood when
water reclaimed all earth’s life except
that strange ark with Noah and the family. And
there was the story of the escape through the
waters that dried up for the fleeing slaves
but swept back to drown the armies pursuing
them. And sometimes there was the story of Jonah
thrown into the fierce sea and swallowed by
the great fish.
Like those artists who painted the baptism,
the church was saying: If we want to know what
the passion and death and resurrection of Jesus
are about, if we want to know them in our minds
and in our bodies, in our hearts and in our
daily lives, then listen here and ponder all
these stories. And remember how, on the cross,
Jesus cried, “I thirst!” And when
he died, both blood and water flowed from his
side and so was born the church.
All of this, all of this is what swirls around
us when we take an adult or an infant to the
font for baptism. But for centuries it did not
seem so. In the Roman Catholic church, baptism
became this quiet, tidy, sweet little event.
The water had all but disappeared — just
a few drops on the forehead. Most Catholics
thought about baptism as the removal of original
sin and, once done, what else was there to say?
Infants were quickly and quietly baptized on
Sunday afternoons. The occasional unbaptized
adult received a few instructions about the
church, then — without the parish as a
whole even being told — was privately
baptized. What was for our ancestors the moment
when life and death did battle, the moment when,
after much preparation, an infant or child or
adult was plunged into the water and loudly
baptized in the name of the Father and of the
Son and of the Holy Spirit, all this had become
just two generations ago an occasion when the
water was less important than the party afterwards.
But forty years ago at the Second Vatican Council
the bishops of the world began to see it clearly
again. Perhaps, being in Rome for the Council,
some of them happened to go to the bishop of
Rome’s cathedral, the church of St John
Lateran, and read what had been carved into
the great baptistery hundreds of years before:
Here is born in Spirit-soaked fertility
a brood destined for another City,
begotten by God’s blowing
and borne upon this torrent
by the Church their virgin mother.
Reborn in these depths they reach for heaven’s
realm . . .
This spring is life that floods the world,
the wounds of Christ its awesome source.
Sinner, sink beneath this sacred surf
that swallows age and spits up youth.
Sinner, here scour sin away down to innocence,
for they know no enmity who are by
one font, one Spirit, one faith made one.
Sinner, shudder not at sin’s kind and
number,
for those born here are holy.
(Translation by Aidan Kavanagh.)
Well, they might have thought, I never heard
of that! How can our musty and often tiny fonts
be places of this wild fertility where God’s
blowing begets new members of the church? How
can our quiet little Sunday afternoons contain
a spring that floods the world, a pool where
sinners are scoured? Then maybe they put it
all together: the Jordan, the baptism Jesus
longed for on Calvary, and the church today.
Now our baptismal fonts are often large; sometimes
they flow with water. Now we are encouraged
to plunge the infant three times into the water
while proclaiming those words: “I baptize
you!” Now no adult comes here in the stillness
of a Sunday afternoon, but in the midst of a
church full of fasting Christians after Lent’s
scrutinies and after much reflection and conversation.
Catechumens are led to this font only when the
vigiling and fasting and prayer of the Triduum
have brought us to the middle of the night between
Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday. Then, while
we call on all the saints, name by name by name,
to pray for us, we approach that spring of life
whose source is Christ’s wounded side.
There they renounce and denounce the evil one
and all that evil does, and profess faith in
God.
Now is water truly the other name for life — and
the other name for death! Here the dying and
the rising of the Lord Jesus are manifest. Here
is our own death and life. No pretty religious
moment this, but future-shattering drowning.
We sing: “You have put on Christ!” Yes,
you have. We have also. And though we struggle
and struggle to get the gospel into our baptized
selves, we are people dead to sin and alive
to God, born-again people set on loving the
world as God loves the world. By the side of
the waters then, fragrant oil is poured over
the newly baptized and rubbed in. There are
new garments, and bright candles in this midnight
hour.
We have six weeks of Ordinary Time and forty
days of Lent before all this happens here, but
the story comes today of the Jordan and the
baptism of Jesus, and we give thanks that in
our hands in these generations after Vatican
II is this work: to be a church that loves the
font of baptism and longs to be there and to
build up the body of Christ; to be Christians
who daily and especially on Sundays take water
that reminds us that we are baptized and then
with that water to sign ourselves with the cross — the
cross where life and death contend each day
in our world and where we must over and over
choose life.
Copyright © Gabe Huck. Used by permission.
Originally written for Celebration,
the worship and preaching resource of the National
Catholic Reporter (visit their Web site at www.celebrationpublications.org).
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These homilies
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however, they may not be commercially published
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